The Drag Safari - Dawn Of The Drags!

Written
by
Drew Hardin
on May 7, 2009 In 1954, Hot Rod Editor Wally Parks Sent Four Men On The Road To Train The Nation How To Run A Drag Race. They Were Called The Drag Safari, And This Is Their Story

1/26The last race of the 1954 Safari was held on an airport runway in Salt Lake City. Here, starter Jim Nelson waves off two B-Altered coupe competitors.

"Here's the thing I remember most of all." Bud Evans was doing what he does best: talking. It's no wonder he was elected to be the race announcer all those years ago. He definitely has the gift. Listening to Evans spin his yarn, I feel like the luckiest automotive writer in the business. All those buff-book guys can have their European trips to test Porsches and junk. I am sitting in a coffee shop surrounded by living legends-and I'm loving every second of it.

On my left is Bud Coons, former sergeant in the Pomona Police Department, and in 1954, the field director of the National Hot Rod Association. He was the crewchief for the NHRA's Drag Safaris from 1954 to 1956. Five decades later, he easily falls back into that role, leading the group in this informal oral history.

On my right is Wally Parks, the founder of the NHRA (while also the editor of this magazine), whose idea it was to send the Safari on the road to preach the gospel of quarter-mile speed and safety.

Across from me is Evans, an "old, old lakes racer" and former announcer at the Colton, California, dragstrip. He claims he went on the Safaris for the free meals.

Next to Evans is long-time HOT ROD lensman Eric "Rick" Rickman, who chronicled the Safari adventures in the magazine through the lens of his military-surplus Speed Graphic and twin-lens Rolleiflex. It was Rickman, not Evans, who got the great food on Safari, since he was the only one with a Petersen Publishing expense account. The then-new NHRA had to be a lot more careful with its bucks.

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The other original member of the Drag Safari, Chic Cannon, couldn't be with us for this interview. He is an inveterate RV'er and was motoring his way around Oregon when we gathered the rest of the group at the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum in Pomona, California. I'd catch up with him a week or so later via cell phone.

Evans describes the routine: "We pull into town. The local car club knows we're coming. They know who we are. We go to a Socony Mobil filling station, and while we're there, cars start stopping. And we're sitting in the wagon waiting to fuel up, and all of a sudden there are six or eight cars there." He had to explain to the guy at the station what was going on. "You see," says Evans, "those people really hadn't seen a drag race before."

It's a hard concept to get your mind around-a world without drag racing. Yet that's exactly why Parks sent this crew on the road. "The NHRA started with the formation of car clubs," Parks explained. "We in Southern California were lucky. We had the dry lakes and Bonneville to run on. We heard of other clubs forming in other parts of the country, and we wanted to instruct them on how to run a meet safely. To insist on safety."

So Coons sold his Studebaker and bought a '54 Dodge two-door station wagon. To it they hitched a travel trailer that held everything they needed to stage a "first-class Regional Championship Drag Meet," as Rickman wrote in his first Safari article: early Chrondek timing equipment, a P.A. system, field telephones, a one-cylinder generator, and miles of stainless-steel wire to bring all the electronic equipment to life. The Safari had but one sponsor-Mobil Oil-which graciously supplied the fuel for the wagon.

In 1954, the Drag Safari made 10 stops on its inaugural coast-to-coast journey. On that first trip, Coons, Cannon, and Rickman were the only Safari members to make the entire loop. Other racers and NHRA members would join them in different cities, stay with the Safari a week or two, and then head home. Parks, too, would meet up with the Safari at certain venues. "I just joined them, didn't travel with them," says Parks. Was that because of your NHRA and magazine editing duties? I asked. "No, we just couldn't afford an extra guy!"

7/26Mobil was the Safety Safari's sole sponsor in 1954, so the group shot a lot of photos at Mobil stations. Judging by the hot rod's Wyoming plate, this picture was taken on the way to the Safari's first race in Texas.

Fortunes improved for the Safari in 1955. Evans joined the group as the fourth permanent traveling member, and Coons' personal two-door wagon was replaced by a four-door '55 Plymouth wagon. That was also the longest Safari of the three, with 17 races in as many cities and towns. In 1956, the Safari caravan grew to include a Plymouth Fury in addition to the wagon and trailer, and the Safari staff was up to six, though the number of races it visited dropped to nine.

Race WeekendTraveling around the country on Safari was "rigorous," admitted Cannon. But for a bunch of 20-year-old guys it wasn't bad.

"We were all single, which helped," he says. "Having a married man in the group just wouldn't work out. There were a few who would join us, but they would leave because they didn't want to be away from their family and be on the road all that time." The shorter Safaris would go for six to eight weeks; the '55 tour stretched to 18.

Typically the Safari crew would roll into town on a Wednesday or Thursday, depending on how far away the previous race had been. The first order of business was to meet with the local city officials and law enforcement agencies to explain the NHRA's program and answer any questions the local agencies might have. Parks told us their Mobil sponsors were instrumental in setting up those meetings, "so we were accepted far more easily. We went to quite a few places where the police departments were instrumental in getting the premises where we would run the race." Coons' status as a former police officer helped lend credibility to the Safari's efforts. Coons also served as the Safari's PR man, often doing radio or even television interviews with local media. "We did everything we could to get publicity," he says.

8/26It looked as though the bad weather that the Safari encountered on the East Coast was going to shut down the Pennellville, New York race on its dirt track. But the sun came out, the strip dried, and the meet went on.

The next task was to meet with the local car club that was going to help put on the meet. "Really, all the manpower came from the clubs," Coons explained. The Safari crew would walk club members through the steps of setting up and running a drag race and then assign each club member a job, from stringing wire for the timing lights to weighing the cars (on borrowed scales the first year), to writing car numbers and classes on the doors.

One of the club's jobs was to round up an ambulance for the event. Sometimes it was an actual ambulance, sometimes it was a station wagon with the seats folded down and a bunch of blankets inside. The race couldn't go on without one, a fact Rickman experienced firsthand at one meet. He lost his footing trying to shoot from the timing tower and tumbled off the two-story structure, breaking his wrist. Even though he had an obvious compound fracture, the other Safari team members didn't want to use the ambulance to take him to the hospital, as it would halt the event. Rick endured the pain through an hour and a half of racing before he got his ride to the emergency room.

The day before an event, Safari members would go out to the race site with the club and start preparations: hanging signs, setting up fences, building the tower, and so on. Early on race morning, Coons and his crew would string all the wire for the timing equipment and PA system.

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Cannon, whose background was in engineering and car building, was in charge of registration and tech inspection. "I'd oversee the inspection and train the club guys so we could standardize the classes throughout the country," he says. "Back then there were no standardized classes. Our classes, which were based on body style and a ratio of cubic inches to weight, were close to what the SCTA had been using. But Pappy [Hart] in Santa Ana would have different classes, and so would other tracks. It was Wally's idea to standardize the classes so you could have standardized, nationwide events."

When Evans joined the team, he would often join Cannon at registration to update his index cards. He had worked out a system in which he'd write down pertinent information about a race car-where it was from, how fast it was at the last meet, and so on-on cards to help him provide color from the tower.

13/26Members of the Crabtown Dragsters out of Maryland chartered a bus to the New Jersey drag race in 1954.

"Kids followed us around from meet to meet," explained Coons. "We'd see guys 700, 800, even 900 miles away at the next meet."

Once the timing equipment was set up, Coons or Rickman would drive a car down the track to test the system. According to Coons, "If it timed, we'd call start." The race went on for two days. "And then we'd be abandoned. We had to go back and roll all that damn wire up, and it would be dark by the time we got out of there."

"I remember I told Bud that he was never going to have to worry about food out there," says Parks, "because these clubs were going to be so happy to see you that they were going to feed you and treat you well-but nobody did!"

The Tale of the TapeOnce the track equipment was put away, Coons says the Safari crew took time to debrief. "We'd run the meet again over cold drinks-"

"Beer," interjects Evans.

"-And try to solve the problems that we had. And believe me, there were problems."

14/26In 1954, General Motors had recently opened a transmission plant near Livonia, Michigan. The Safari organized a race on the plant's access road, which turned to dirt after a quarter mile.

The group would describe the meet in detail into a reel-to-reel tape recorder. That tape, and Rickman's film, would then be shipped back to Parks in Los Angeles. Because the NHRA could only afford two reels of tape, Parks would have to relay one reel back to the Safari while he was transcribing the other, using the recorded information to help him write the story about the race and identify the cars in Rick's photos. It also gave him invaluable information about how the NHRA's rules and policies were working out.

"These guys were the eyes and ears of what we were trying to portray out to the troops in the field," Parks says. He would sift through the information from the meet and from what Cannon uncovered through tech inspections to look for potential problems that could be dealt with through new NHRA regulations. "It wasn't hard to find fault because it was all new," says Parks. Once new regulations were drawn, they'd be printed in HOT ROD and in the NHRA's newsletter. "Back then we didn't have the long-lead deadlines that you do now, so we could get the information printed and out in the field quickly."

Sometimes not quickly enough. "Because guys were blowing their engines and stuff was coming back at them, we came up with a hood requirement while we were on the road," says Coons. "Well, it got in the magazine just before we got to the race in [Linden] New Jersey. So when we started doing inspections there were no hoods, and guys were turned down because there were no hoods. Well, Chic was the inspector, and he told them, 'Go find a sign or something.' Pretty soon every beer sign and Coca Cola sign for 5 miles from that track was fit on the top of those things."

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Racers are nothing if not creative, both in the ways they meet regulations and how they try to get around them. Coons remembers one such regulation that came down after a meet in Redding, California, in 1955. There, a racer flipped his car and narrowly avoided serious injury. He was especially lucky since the Safari crew learned after the accident that "he had constructed that thing out of exhaust pipe. Including the rollbar."

So a new rule was handed down that called for a hole to be drilled into the rollbar so tech inspectors could measure its thickness. But soon after, some racers figured out how to snake a washer up through that hole, "hit it with a torch, and the washer'd be fixed to the inside of the tubing," says Evans, picking up the story. "So when we mic'd it, it was legal stuff."

19/26Bud Coons' PR work extended to interviews with the local media. Here he is (left) on KMTV's "Camera on Sports" program in Omaha, Nebraska.

Being in the tower above the action, Evans could spot potential trouble before those on the ground could. "I was seeing stuff up there that you wouldn't believe," Evans says. "I couldn't tell what was happening in the pits or what was happening in the line getting ready to come up, but boy, when they ran, if they weren't straight arrow I was screaming bloody murder. Because as the meet progresses and they go faster and faster-dump the can to it, you know-if he's not good in the beginning, he's going to be worse as he gets going." That's how the association came up with a 22-degree caster spec for the front wheels. "Twenty-two degrees was unheard of," Coons says, "because you couldn't back the car up. But at least when it was going down the strip it would be straight."

"Strip" in this case was a very subjective term. Back in the early '50s there were very few dedicated drag-race tracks, especially in the Midwestern and eastern cities visited by the Safari. Typically the races would be run on abandoned or unused airstrips. But not always. The dirt-road track in Pennellville, New York, turned into a mud hole thanks to hurricane-driven rain, but it dried enough to run the meet.

And then there was the meet in Livonia, Michigan, near Detroit. "GM had just built a brand-new transmission plant, and they allowed us to use its service road," says Coons. Added Parks, "But it was paved for a quarter mile, and then it ran off into the dirt." This wasn't too much of an issue for most of the racers, except one-a guy named Art Arfons. "The Green Monster showed up, and that thing burned rubber clear off the pavement," remembered Coons, laughing. "It ended up with the dust and dirt flying up at the other end."

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The CarsSafari members didn't see many purpose-built drag cars in the first year or so of their travels. "But in the end we saw more and more and more," says Evans.

"We could always tell when we were in an area where guys had been discharged out of the service and were old hot rodders from California," Coons recalled. "God, we ran into some wild machines, really wild. Then we'd get to another town that would be mostly stockers, some dual manifolds, street roadsters, very few injected jobs or stripped chassis, stuff like that."

21/26Bob Sullivan of the Kansas City Dragsters awaits the drop of the starter's flag at the Omaha, Nebraska, race in 1954. This run proved to be the fastest of the meet: The Olds-powered digger clocked a 123.79-mph pass.

Chic Cannon agrees. The fastest cars usually belonged to "an ex-Californian, or a sharp easterner, someone who was a gear-head from year one. Or they belonged to guys who read HOT ROD and dreamed of being in California."

Even though the Safari members watched literally thousands of cars go down those makeshift strips, a few stood out in their memories. Recalled Evans, "There was this kid from Pennsylvania with a black A/Altered coupe. I looked back through the timing sheets and saw he won at one meet at 98 mph, at the next event he turned 114, next event he was just a few mph faster than his competition. Bud said, 'I don't know where this guy gets all his speed.' I went over and looked in the back of his pickup truck, and under this canvas he had all these 1-gallon cans. About 30 1-gallon cans with different things written on them. I asked him, 'Where does your dad work?' Turns out he worked for Socony-Mobil. He's the one who invented our fuel tester. And so for the kid, speed was nothing; 90 mph, 120 mph, 112 mph-he just won every time.He didn't want to go too fast, he just wanted to win."

And then there was a '34 Ford coupe that Evans watched in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, "that just blew everybody away.I thought, it can't be a stocker. I think he's got another engine in the back. It's all silver back there. So when he came back into the pits, I got down from the stand and went over to look at it. In the back of that thing, coming out from underneath the '34 trunk, is a tank, straight down behind the seats, all heliarc-welded stainless steel. I asked him what he had in the tank. 'Nothing, now,' he said. I asked what it was for. He says 'It's for white lightning. I run white lightning.' And I thought, Jesus, he's telling everybody that's a stock engine?"

22/26Here's four of the original team who brought drag racing to the nation, minus only Chic Cannon. From left to right: Bud Coons, Eric Rickman, Bud Evans, and Wally Parks. They pose with a reproduction of the original Safari wagon.

The Safari Comes to an End-or Does It?The 1956 Safety Safari was the last of the original coast-to-coast instructional trips. I asked Parks if the Safaris stopped because the NHRA felt its work was finished. Not at all, he replied. Drag racing was getting a real foothold in the country, but at the same time so were concerns, ironically, about its safety. Mobil stopped supporting the Safari after 1956 because certain corporate heads were worried about the company's affiliation with such a potentially dangerous sport.

And yet, statistics compiled at the time painted a completely different picture. According to a report published by the NHRA before the start of the 1956 Safari, drag racing had achieved "...a mark of distinction for safety that is without parallel among mass participation sports." In a spot-check of 434 drag events sanctioned by the NHRA in 1955, more than 35,000 cars and 2,700 motorcycles had competed, watched by more than a half-million spectators. Given that level of participation, "there were less than six claims for property damage and fewer than that many claims for participant injuries, none of these being of major nature," says the report.

The statistical record of the NHRA's continued emphasis on safety is one way to measure the successful groundwork laid by the original Safety Safaris. On a more personal level, Chic Cannon told us this story:

When Cannon went back to the Indy Nationals during the NHRA's 50th anniversary year, Don Garlits made a point of seeking him out and thanking him for not letting his car pass tech in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1955. Apparently the rollbar in Big Daddy's roadster wasn't up to spec, and Cannon refused him entry. He also then spent some time explaining to the young racer how to build it properly. Garlits took his car back to Ocala, nearly 100 miles away, refabbed the bar, and was back for Sunday's event. "I remembered him as just a guy in a roadster," Cannon says. But Garlits knew the value of what Cannon had taught him that day.

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Today's SafariThe Safety Safari name resurfaced in the NHRA in the '70s when, according to former NHRA Competition Director Steve Gibbs, a consistent source of emergency equipment and staff to operate it became crucial.

"Until then we got the stuff locally, and it worked OK with just the handful of national events we had," Gibbs explained. "But it became evident that we had to take our own stuff around. You've got to have the tools to do the job." So in a move reminiscent of the original Safari, Gibbs got a Dodge pickup and a travel trailer and filled it with tools. The first piece of equipment was one of the then-new Jaws of Life rescue tools, donated by Hurst's Dick Otte.

"That trailer was immediately overloaded," recalled Gibbs. "We tried to use it as an office and transportation. But we kept getting more and more stuff-extinguishers, firesuits, and such. The Safety Safari has grown ever since, from one truck and trailer to a couple of GMC pickups and a bigger trailer, to the 18-wheeler and all the trucks and trailers we have now."

Gibbs' initial goal for the Safari was quick response in case of an accident, but the Safari's role also grew into track preparation and maintenance, and now emergency services is a separate division.

There is definite value in having a core group of Safari workers, Gibbs says. "It can be really comforting to the drivers to see a familiar face and to know the guy will take care of it the right way. If you get upside down, and you know that the guy taking you out will be the same guy, that improves your confidence level."

One of those familiar faces was original Safety Safari member Chic Cannon, who came back in the mid '80s after a successful career in irrigation. "I wanted to get back to my first love-hot rodding-so I got back in touch with Wally and told him I wanted back on the Safety Safari." Cannon worked on the team "as a dragstrip janitor, mostly" until 1996.